This is the time of year many humor columnists look forward to more than any other — for us it’s as eagerly anticipated as Super Bowl Sunday is for football fans, Oscar night is for movie buffs, and April 20 is for potheads. That’s because this week marks the release of the annual list of Ig Nobel Award winners, honoring the select group of scientists and other researchers who have made “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

The Ig Nobel Awards are timed to coincide with the real Nobel Prizes which, while impressive, honor achievements that are typically lost on we non-scientific types in the general public. Bear in mind that, according to a recent survey, 48 percent of Americans don’t know where chocolate milk comes from, while 7 percent of us believe the source is … brown cows. So with that as a baseline for our collective intelligence, it’s not a stretch to believe that University of Washington physicist David J. Thouless’ Nobel for ”theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter” is probably going to be a little too theoretical for us, or that biologist John B. Gurdon’s Nobel Prize in Medicine for “the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent” would leave most of us scratching our heads, saying “Huh?”

By contrast, the Ig Nobel Awards are much more, um, accessible to the average person. In fact, the Ig Nobels not only understand our collective “Huh?” reaction to many science stories, in 2015 they even gave an award to researchers who discovered that the word “Huh?” (or its equivalent) exists in every human language. I believe this marked the first time in linguistic history that the term being studied was also the appropriate response to the study itself.

Since launching in 1991, the Ig Nobels have consistently highlighted the most bizarre, obscure and often hilarious research being conducted across the scientific world. Just a few of my favorites include:

• The 2002 Award in Biology that went to a group of British researchers who demonstrated that the presence of humans tends to sexually arouse ostriches. The researchers concluded that these findings “may be important in the reproductive success of ostriches in a farming environment.” Sadly, I could find no follow-up research studying what effect the presence of ostriches has on human sexual arousal.

• In 2009 the Chemistry Ig Nobel went to scientists at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, for creating diamond film from tequila. I admit I don’t know what “diamond film” is, how you create it from tequila, or why that would be an area of study meriting recognition. But I do know that while I’ve never personally made any kind of film from tequila, when I was younger my tequila-related “research” often played a role in creating many embarrassing photos.

• The 2014 Ig Nobel in Medicine went to Stanford physician Ian Humphreys, who discovered that “uncontrollable” nosebleeds can be successfully treated by applying nasal packs consisting of strips of cured pork. This also proved that some folk remedies dismissed as “old wives tales” may nevertheless be effective, even if the “old wives” in question appear to have been under the influence of LSD.

The 2017 crop of Ig Nobels did not disappoint either. In Anatomy, British physician James Heathcote won for his ground-breaking efforts to answer the age-old question, “Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?” while a group of French researchers won for their use of advanced brain-scanning technology to measure how much different people are disgusted by cheese.

But my favorite this year had to be the Ig Nobel in Economics awarded to Australian researchers Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer, who investigated the critical question of how contact with a live crocodile affects a person’s gambling habits.

According to Rockliff and Greer, holding a 3.3-foot long crocodile causes one’s adrenaline to surge, which leads problem gamblers to misinterpret the excitement of holding a dangerous animal as a sign they were on a lucky streak — and bet more recklessly as a result.

And while this research is no doubt useful, and will help problem gamblers make more judicious decisions about handling live reptiles prior to making bets, I believe there’s much more to explore in the realm of crocodile-related gambling research. Like, say, at the poker table, where players often employ psychological tricks to influence opponents’ play. While expert poker players can sometimes say just the right thing to affect another player’s decisions, how much more effective might it be to say, “I think you should probably fold your hand, and you know who agrees with me?” [Reaches into bag] “My three-foot long reptilian friend, Sir Snappington.”

The only downside to the Ig Nobel Awards is the confusion that must result when scientists find out they’ve been so honored.

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